


Thy Fearful Symmetry

by Jothowrote



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Harry Lives, His Dark Materials AU, M/M, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, daemon AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 17:07:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4108501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jothowrote/pseuds/Jothowrote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s still staring out the window, at the fence. At the space where, for a moment, he could have sworn he saw a Red Kite perched, looking through the window at him with one beady eye.</p><p>But there was nothing there.</p><p>‘I didn’t see her, Eggsy,’ Gwenwyn says softly, sliding around his neck. ‘We’re tired, that’s all.’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ he says, distractedly.</p><p>Or</p><p>The daemon AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thy Fearful Symmetry

**Author's Note:**

> A Daemon AU that every fandom needs (but probably not the one it deserves). Daemon explanations in the notes at the end.
> 
> Edit(11/6/15): Gone through and fixed some of my hideous typos. If you catch any I've missed, please give me a shout.

‘Get in the car,’ Chester King says. Eggsy pauses.

He gets in the car, though, because it’s the final test, and he can’t let Harry down.

It’s a silent, uncomfortable journey, with Chester King’s sour face and his own nervously beating heart. Gwenwyn twists anxiously around Eggsy’s arm, her dry, cool skin rasping comfortingly against his own. Eggsy taps his foot for a while, but King sends him a quelling look.

Eggsy is _very_ relieved when the car pulls up, finally, into dismal car park round the back of some warehouses.

‘Is this it?’ he asks, looking around at the grey concrete, under grey clouds.

‘This is the final test,’ Chester King says. ‘Walk with me.’

Eggsy has an awful sense of foreboding, but he obediently follows King to a door on the side of the warehouse. King presses his hand to a patch of wall, which then swings open to reveal a keypad. He enters the code (Eggsy watches surreptitiously and commits the numbers to memory) and then wipes his hands on his handkerchief as the door swings open.

‘After you,’ King says, sardonically.

The warehouse is completely empty, and Eggsy is tensed and ready for a surprise attack. Nothing happens; King follows him in, and the door swings shut behind him.

‘What do you see?’

Eggsy looks around, wondering if it’s meant to be a trick question. Then he sees it.

Hovering in the air, around chest height, is a – well, the best description is window, because in all honestly Eggsy has no idea what the fuck it’s supposed to be.

‘What… ‘ he asks, going up and peering through. He can see some sort of marsh beyond it, grey mud and grey water and grey grass. It looks like a picture of an apocalyptic future.

Eggsy waves a hand through it. Nothing happens.

‘Look around the other side?’ Gwenwyn suggests. He does; he can see the same landscape through the other side, although there are a few different trees and ground formations. Eggsy sticks an arm through, waves it around. He looks around the window, and his arm appears to be vanishing into thin air.

‘Wicked,’ he breathes.

‘That is a doorway to another world. Your final task,’ King says, with a cruel twist to his mouth, ‘is to walk to that tree.’

Eggsy looks through the window, at the gnarled, ancient tree standing proud in the grey landscape.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he says. King doesn’t deign to give that a response.

Walking to the tree, thought Eggsy. Right, can’t be too difficult.

As soon as he steps through, one foot sinking into the marshy ground, he realises the true horror of the task. Gwenwyn, with a pained cry, has slid from his arm and is curled in a small heap on the warehouse floor.

‘Oh yes,’ King says, grinning like the bastard Eggsy knew he was, ‘did I forget to mention that daemons can’t go in that particular world?’

Eggsy breathes hard through his nose, and ignores King. Rounding his shoulders, he takes a few more steps towards the tree.

‘Eggsy!’ Gwenwyn calls out, high and terrified, when the bond between them begins to strain. ‘Eggsy, don’t!’

Eggsy grits his teeth, and continues.

The pain is indescribable. It tears at his insides, blurring his vision with tears and making his limbs tremble with fatigue. Behind him, on the dusty warehouse floor, Gwenwyn twists and shakes.

‘Eggsy!’

He collapses, kneeling in waist-deep swamp water, tears pouring from his face. Gwenwyn cries again, one last, reedy wail, and then he’s splashing through the water, throwing himself bodily through the doorway and gathering her in his arms.

‘I’m so sorry, I’m sorry,’ he cries, while Chester looks on in disdain.

‘At least the girl had some balls,’ he says. 

*

‘The process doesn’t kill you,’ Harry says later, disappointment starkly apparent in his eyes. Eggsy can barely look at him. ‘It merely… separates you.’

‘We can be as far apart as possible, and it can’t kill us,’ Leandra adds. ‘It’s good for working undercover – agents just wear an empty beetle daemon protector around their neck, or use their trained dog, and their true daemon is safely out the way.’

At Eggsy’s feet, JB snuffles into the carpet.

‘But it hurt,’ Gwenwyn says, twisting around Eggsy’s hands restlessly. ‘How… how did you manage it through the _pain_?’

‘The pain is necessary,’ Harry said, his face still as stone. ‘The test is more than its useful side effect – a Kingsman agent must be prepared to give up everything for his country.’

Eggsy knows then, in that moment, that he could never give up Gwenwyn. Not for Kingsman. Not for anything.

*

He’s always been the odd boy with the snake daemon. Gwenwyn hadn’t been indecisive like other daemons; she’d very rarely changed shape even before she settled, and she settled earlier than most, before Eggsy’s fourteenth birthday. They’d had to grow up fast.

There’s a strange stigma about snake daemons, but Eggsy likes her slim body and her quiet, coiled strength. Gwenwyn’s an adder, prettily patterned and dangerous, and he loves that she can curl close to his skin and stay out of sight. He doesn’t envy those unfortunate souls with daemons so large they can’t fit on the tube at rush hour. A kid at his secondary school went home one day with her daemon flitting between butterfly and bird, and turned up at registration the next morning with a her daemon a settled Shire horse.

Nah – he likes Gwenwyn’s subtle strength and speed, her subtle colouring and her subtle size. It’s just unfortunate that Dean’s dog daemon likes to catch Gwenwyn in her teeth and shake her like a rag doll, leaving Eggsy feeling ill and disoriented. 

His mother’s daemon hops over to Gwenwyn afterwards, each time, as long as Michelle isn’t too badly hurt or dragged away after Dean. He nuzzles Gwenwyn’s head and lets her curl up in his soft brown fur, but it still hurts them for a long time after. And he’s wary of Gwenwyn – Daemons may not be animals, but their shapes are a projection of their character, and snakes and rabbits have never been close.

Eggsy knows it’s because he’s supposed to be the one to protect Michelle, and Daisy, and her still changing daemon, but he can’t and he feels weak and useless.

Gwenwyn’s shape is sometimes just the reminder of all the potential he’s thrown away. And sometimes it’s a necessary reminder that he’s not just a chav from the wrong part of the estate, with the standard angry fighting animal baring its teeth by his side. Gwenwyn’s teeth are most often hidden, and are more deadly than a dog’s.

When Harry bursts into his life, bringing Kingsman in his wake, Eggsy is admiring of his silent, stoic bird of prey daemon, just as magnificent and deadly as Harry himself. He struggles to hide his chuckles from Merlin and his owl daemon, and is ever so slightly envious of Roxy and her grey wolf. 

But at the end of the day, Gwenwyn settling as a snake is one of the few things in their short life that they’ve done good.

*

He watches Harry die and the world starts to go to shit. He watches as Chester King kills himself, and feels a dark satisfaction curl around his heart.

Before they go to Valentine’s base and try to save the world, though, he knows there’s something he still has to do.

‘Where are you going?’ Merlin shouts after him, as he speeds away in a stolen car.

The strange window in the air is still in the warehouse when Eggsy gets there. Gwenwyn shivers at the sight of the grey world beyond it, but her voice is steady.

‘Do it,’ she says, and Eggsy steps through.

When her cries reach his ears, he blocks them out and pushes on. Two steps from the trunk of the tree, and he feels something tear, a rupturing somewhere near his heart, and the pain – blessedly – stops. 

He brushes the rough, dead bark with his hand, before turning and trudging back through the mud.

Gwenwyn is slack and unresponsive when he scoops her from the floor, and she refuses to talk to him for the whole journey back.

‘We didn’t do it for Kingsman,’ Eggsy says, as he drives back to HQ at top speed. ‘We didn’t do it for our goddamn country.’

She slides into his sleeve when they climb into the plane, and curls into her favourite place around his neck, where her cold body can leech off his body heat. She whispers into his ear, weak but there, ‘we did it for Harry and Leandra.’

Across from him, Lugh is curled up on a chair and whimpering softly to himself. Roxy may have passed the final test first time, unlike Eggsy, but she and her daemon have never been so far away from each other as to be out of sight, and he’s suffering. He’d refused Gwenwyn’s attempts at comfort, however, and had turned in on himself to suffer in silence. Eggsy remembered the way the wolf daemon had whined in panic as Roxy had ascended into the sky. He’d run around in circles, getting more and more anxious, until Badb had snapped at him to get a hold of himself. Merlin’s tawny owl may have been a lot smaller than Lugh but she was tougher than she looked, and Lugh’s whines had fallen silent.

Eggsy had preferred it when Lugh had been making a noise.

There was something unnatural about seeing a daemon without their other half – it made them more animalistic, somehow, less human, as though they were still only a thin line away from the shape they took.

Eggsy runs a finger down Gwenwyn’s long body, and feels her shudder a little against him. Their parting and the pain of it was still fresh in both their minds, but they both knew it had been necessary.

He wishes Harry could have known that he did it.

*

They save the world, and then it all goes back to the usual amount of barely restrained chaos. Kingsman is understaffed and very busy, but Eggsy and Roxy are still the newbies and are most often left with the new candidates brought in to fill all the vacant positions left behind after V-day. Chester King may have been the only traitor, but the sim-created rage had caused three agents to turn on each other and be mortally wounded before Eggsy had killed Valentine.

Eggsy doesn’t complain, though, because he counts himself lucky that he’s still allowed in Kingsman at all.

When he gets home late, after a long day of supervising the new recruits, Eggsy isn’t surprised to find his sister asleep in her new, freshly decorated nursery and his mum conked out in front of the telly with a ready meal congealing on the table beside her. JB is asleep beside her, snoring in a contented way.

‘Come on, mum,’ he says, shaking her gently awake, ‘you’ll get a crick in your neck if you sleep ‘ere.’

‘You’re late home, Eggsy,’ his mum mutters sleepily. ‘It’s past eleven.’

‘Bit of a staffing crisis,’ he jokes, clearing away the dinner detritus. He rinses the plastic cases in the sink before putting them in the recycling – now he’s got the posh house, and the nice gear, he’s damned if he isn’t going to behave like a gentleman. He’s come too far to behave like a pig in muck.

He’s washing the glasses when he happens to glance out the window. The glass slips from his hand and smashes into pieces on the tiled floor.

‘Eggsy?’ His mum opens the door, wide awake now and panicked. Benji is clutched in her arms. ‘Are you alright, luv?’

‘Yeah, mum; sorry,’ Eggsy says, distracted. ‘Yeah, I … I just slipped, s’all. Busy day and all that.’

‘Ok, watch the glass,’ she warns. ‘Night night.’

‘Night mum,’ Eggsy calls, and he stands still in the kitchen, listening to the sounds of his mum’s foosteps going up the stairs. He’s still staring out the window, at the fence. At the space where, for a moment, he could have sworn he saw a Red Kite perched, looking through the window at him with one beady eye.

But there was nothing there.

‘I didn’t see her, Eggsy,’ Gwenwyn says softly, sliding around his neck. ‘We’re tired, that’s all.’

‘Yeah,’ he says, distractedly. Then he sweeps up the glass carefully, because Daisy’s going through the phase of boycotting shoes and he doesn’t want her to cut herself because of his own stupid mistakes.

‘There was nothing there,’ he affirms as he eats his own ready meal in front of some late-night panel show. 

He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.

*

He sees Red Kites everywhere it seems, these days. A mission on Oxford drives him to distraction, as he sees at least ten of the damn birds hovering above the M4, hunting for mice in the fields. Each time he has to remind himself that he’s only seeing real birds, not daemons. Not Leandra.

Not Harry. Harry’s dead. Harry died disappointed in him, and no amount of wishful thinking can change that.

*

The first mission he goes on when he and Gwenwyn have to use their new separation is one of the hardest things Eggsy has ever had to do. The beetle daemon locket he wears around his neck feels uncomfortable and clunky, and he feels like a liar when people comment on it.

‘She’s very shy,’ he says, deflecting their questions. ‘She’s very delicate,’ he tells them. He feels like he’s erasing Gwenwyn from existence, denying part of himself.

He grits his teeth, and gets on with the job, and if he cries a little late at night when there’s no small body curled up to his own, well, that’s something between him and Merlin that he knows won’t get any further.

Of course, the mission ends badly – he finishes his first ever trip to Taipei lying in a pool of his own blood, coughing wetly and reaching for his absent daemon.

‘Gwennie,’ he chokes. ‘Gwennie, don’t leave me.’

There’s no answer, and for a moment in the haze of pain Eggsy forgets about their separation and thinks that he’s dead, that Gwenwyn has already disintegrated into dust and left him alone. The thought is so terrifying that he only faintly hears a flutter of wings.

‘Hold on Eggsy,’ says a voice, close to his head. Something soft nuzzles his cheek. ‘Hold on. Gwenwyn’s safe, they’re coming for you. Just hold on, darling.’

Eggsy relaxes a little, and the heavy blackness engulfs him. When he wakes again, he’s on a plane surrounded by people in white coats, and Gwenwyn is tucked into the crook of his arm.

‘Gwennie,’ he breathes.

‘I’m here, Eggsy,’ she says, weak but there. ‘I’m here.’

It’s no surprise to Eggsy that his worst fear is of taking too long to die. It’s a common fear, he knows – many children have nightmares about the possibility of being on Earth for those few seconds before death, when your daemon has already faded into dust and, for the first time in your life, you are alone.

The idea terrifies Eggsy.

This new separation they’ve achieved is so close to this fear that Eggsy starts getting nightmares again, waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, out of breath and a heart going like a rabbit.

He’s grateful for the superior construction of the house given to him by Kingsman, to the as-good-as soundproof walls that keep his mother and sister from hearing his screams in the night. He’s given a month to heal after his disaster in Taipei, and he spends the first two weeks trying and failing to sleep through the night. He spends his days at HQ, trying to be useful, and Roxy doesn’t hang about when she notices the bags under his eyes getting larger and darker as the days go on.

‘You look like shit,’ she says, blunt as ever, Lugh trotting smartly at her heels. Eggsy looks up from the files he’s sorting for Merlin, who’d finally caved to his pleading and given him something to do.

‘Thanks, Rox,’ he says. ‘You don’t look spectacular yerself.’

‘That’s because I’ve just got back from the other side of the world and I’m horrifically jet-lagged,’ Roxy says smartly. ‘You, on the other hand, have been on bed rest and relaxation for the past two weeks, so you have no excuse.’

Eggsy thinks, for a moment, about telling Roxy about his nightmares. And then he remembers that Roxy had passed the final test with final colours.

‘It’s all this rest,’ he says. ‘It don’t suit me.’

That night, he dreams of Harry dying alone in Kentucky, with his own daemon far away. He dreams of the daemons of the people in the church, bursting into dust everywhere you looked, and their people falling down with the light leaving their eyes.

He wakes up with Gwenwyn wrapped around his face, his tears streaking her diamond-pattered skin.

*

Merlin eventually gets tired of Eggsy under his feet at HQ, and forces him to spend his last week at home. Eggsy actually finds he enjoys it; Daisy’s still only on half-days at the nursery, and he takes her out in the afternoons. They go to the Aquarium, and ignore the signs that say ABSOLUTELY NO DAEMONS IN THE TANKS so that Florian can splash about with the manta rays. They go on the London Eye and see the sights, and they go and see wax celebrities at Madame Tussauds. Each night they get home tired out, to Michelle’s amusement, and Eggsy manages to sleep through the night for three days consecutively.

And then they go to the park, and one of Dean’s old mates sees them from across the street and tails them there. Eggsy clocks him pretty early on – he’s an ugly bugger with a distinctive spotted hyena daemon, and he’s not exactly inconspicuous, though he probably thinks he’s being all James Bond from the way he keeps turning his coat collar up and darting behind corners.

Eggsy’s focusing on him, then, when his stomach swoops with nausea and Gwenwyn calls out in fright.

Eggsy tries to stand, but staggers – he turns enough to see a bald brute of a man with Gwenwyn held tight in his meaty fist. She’s thrashing against his hold, but if she feels as bad as he does then Eggsy doubts she’ll be able to break loose by herself.

‘What…’ he begins, before doubling over to throw up. Florian turns into a mouse and burrows into Daisy’s lap, and Daisy starts to cry.

‘Dean wants to see ‘is little girl,’ says the man with the hyena daemon, finally stepping out from the tree he’d been lurking behind. 

‘He don’t give a fuck about Daisy,’ Eggsy spits, but he can barely stand. His whole body is revolting at the feeling of Gwenwyn being held by another, a violation so awful he’d never even seen it happen, let alone experienced it.

Hyena man steps closer. 

‘And who’s gonna stop us, ey?’ he says, all bravado now that Eggsy is all but incapacitated. He gets right up in Eggsy’s face, and then spits. Eggsy lunges at him, but weak as he is, he misses and falls hard to the floor, getting a mouth of dirt for his troubles. Hyena man scoops Daisy up, though with difficulty – the toddler is wailing and thrashing in his grasp, much to Eggsy’s pride. A couple of other people in the park have begun to notice the disturbance, but most are steering clear.

Gwenwyn’s struggling is dying down, and Eggsy feels like shit. His wounds from Taipei, barely healed as it was, are starting to burn with pain, and all he can do is watch helplessly as Hyena man carts Daisy away.

There’s a screech, and then the bald man’s dog daemon yelps as something fast dives at her head. The bald man winces, and his hand loosens around Gwenwyn. She takes her chance and strikes, biting the man’s hand with a fierceness Eggsy rarely sees – he is usually violent enough for both of them. The man curses and drops her, rubbing at the bite with his other hand. Gwenwyn slides quickly over to Eggsy, who holds her close and sobs for a second – just a second, because then she says,

‘Daisy and Florian, Eggsy – he’s taking them away!’

Eggsy gives her one last stroke on her flat head before pushing himself to his feet and running to catch up. Hyena man is trying to get into a nearby van, flailing toddler still in his arms, but he drops the keys in his haste and no sooner does he reach for them than they’re scooped up by…

Eggsy doesn’t look at what takes the keys, and is instead single-mindedly focused on getting Daisy out of the man’s arms. 

The man seems to have some sense of self-preservation, however, because as soon as he realises the keys are lost and that his colleague has lost control of Eggsy, he drops Daisy roughly to the ground and legs it down the road.

Eggsy immediately gathers the sobbing toddler into his arms. The hyena man doesn’t get far, anyway; Gwenwyn strikes out and catches his hyena daemon’s leg as she runs past, and she falls heavily to the ground. The man follows suit soon after, unable to go more than ten metres away from his downed daemon.

The van keys fall to the pavement near Eggsy. He looks down at them, and then up at the sky.

And then he knows.

He gets Daisy home first, though, because she’s had a trying day.

*

At first he wonders whether the separation of human and daemon can allow the daemon to live on after their human dies. But then he remembers Chester King’s lioness daemon vanishing into the air after his head hit the table, and he knows the truth.

Despite all appearances, Harry Hart didn’t die when he was shot in the head.

Eggsy’s almost perfectly split between deep, heart-breaking relief and deep, visceral anger. If Harry was alive, why hadn’t he told him? Was it because he’d failed the final test? Had he lost Harry’s attention because of his fuck-ups, just as he’d lost everyone else in his life worth a fucking damn apart from his mum and sister? 

‘We should at least let them explain,’ Gwenwyn reasons, after Eggsy’d settled Daisy down in front of cbeebies with her colouring books and every crayon she owned. Eggsy grunts in response.

‘They’ll have reasons,’ Gwenwyn tries again. Eggsy strokes her head, but he doesn’t agree.

In the kitchen, as he peels carrots for Daisy’s snack, Gwenwyn nudges his cheek. He turns his head and sees movement on the fence outside.

‘Open the window, Eggsy,’ she says softly.

Leandra settles herself on the back of a kitchen stool with a regal air, fixing a few feathers while Eggsy tries to stop his hands from shaking.

‘Before you start, Eggsy, I feel I should tell you that you’re the first to know.’

Eggsy opens his mouth, can’t think of what to say to that, and shuts it again.

‘You were watching us?’ Gwenwyn asks. Leandra inclined her head.

‘I have been keeping an eye on you two, yes. God knows you get into enough trouble to merit it.’

‘And Harry?’ Eggsy manages, through a throat that feels as parched as the Sahara. ‘He’s… ok?’

‘To be honest,’ Leandra says, and she suddenly looks guilty, inasmuch as a bird can look guilty. ‘To be honest, I don’t actually know the details. All I know – and now all that you know – is that Harry is at least still alive.’

‘You mean, you haven’t seen him?’

‘All I know is that I didn’t vanish from existence,’ Leandra snaps. Then she sighs. ‘Sorry, Gwenwyn, but… it’s all been a little difficult, recently.’

‘But why didn’t you tell us?’ Eggsy asks, determinedly trying not to cry. 

‘Before he left, Harry told me to look after you. I don’t think he ever thought that he’d be so long in getting back, but then, who does know their future.’ She shuffles her feathers, and Eggsy bites back an impatient noise.

‘Harry could be anything from in a coma to brain damaged, and I have been doing my job,’ Leandra says, primly.

‘It was you in Taipei,’ Eggsy says, suddenly. Leandra inclines her head.

‘Don’t you want to go to Harry?’ Gwenwyn asks, overcoming her perpetual shyness around the other daemon and piping up from her cosy spot around Eggsy’s neck. ‘Aren’t you desperate to see him?’

‘We… argued, before he left,’ Leandra admits. ‘I wanted to come with him – I was needed here.’

‘To watch us,’ Eggsy says bitterly, ‘to make sure we didn’t fuck it up any worse than what we already did.’

‘No!’ Leandra cries, suddenly. ‘It’s… it’s because we _care_ about you, Eggsy. For so long, it’s just been us, and now you’ve been part of our lives… well,’ she says, ‘we find ourselves loath to losing your companionship.’

And then Eggsy realises the side effect of the separation test, the final Kingsman hurdle. Too much time spent apart, and Harry and Leandra have drifted apart, become almost separate individuals. Having Eggsy and Gwenwyn there must have eased the way for them to become close again.

Eggsy refuses to think about what else Leandra has said. _We care about you, Eggsy_.

‘Well,’ he says, slowly, ‘if your job is to watch over us, and we happened to go looking for Harry, then I s’pose you don’t really have a choice about coming with us.’

‘That sounds perfectly reasonable to me,’ Leandra says, somewhat sniffily.

*

Once informed, Merlin immediately puts them on a plane to Kentucky with the same kind of single-minded determination he’d shown during the whole Valentine debacle. Roxy promises Eggsy that she’ll keep an eye on his mum and Daisy, but Merlin’s already sorted out enough evidence for Dean to be sent down for a long time yet, and Eggsy feels lighter than he has done for a long time.

For the whole plane journey, he barely takes his eyes off Leandra, some small but loud part of him constantly worried that she’ll disintegrate into dust in front of his eyes. Gwenwyn seems to have the same worries – she spends the majority of the time in the air curled around the Kite’s feet, as though her physical presence would prevent Leandra from vanishing. Leandra puts up a disinterested front, but Eggsy sees it the moment the daemon relaxes into Gwenwyn’s embrace.

In the end, it’s all rather anticlimactic. They find Harry as an unknown survivor from the church, claiming amnesia, in a hospital nearby. The hospital is full to bursting, dealing with the aftermath of V-day, but Eggsy pushes his way through the masses with the authority of his expensive suit and ‘get out of my fucking way’ expression.

Harry himself is sitting up in bed, his head swaddled with bandages, a mug of tea held delicately in one hand and the daily paper in the other. On seeing him alive and so – so normal – Eggsy can’t help but let out a deep, relieved breath. When it comes to actually stepping into the hospital room, however, he falters. Leandra, too, seems to be unable to make the last few metres either.

It’s Gwenwyn, in the end, who first makes a move. She slides down Eggsy’s leg and slithers into the room, using a bedpost to climb onto the bed and make her way up to Harry.

‘You’re alive!’ she cries joyfully, and Harry looks up from grimacing at his tea.

‘Gwenwyn?’ he asks, in disbelief. Then he looks up, and sees Eggsy hovering in the doorway. His face softens in something that Eggsy could call affection.

‘Eggsy,’ he says, but then he stops in surprise. Eggsy is pretty surprised as well, as he watches Gwenwyn slide up Harry’s body and wrap around his neck. It feels… strange, Eggsy thinks, to have his daemon voluntarily touch another person. Nothing like the time in the park, with the bald man and his rough hands. It had a strange intimacy to it, as though they were suddenly the only people in the world.

‘Gwen,’ Eggsy starts, a little choked, but then he just watches as Harry drops his paper in his lap, and lifts his hand to stroke a finger down Gwenwyn’s flat head. Eggsy shudders in pleasure even as Gwenwyn vibrates in her own delight.

There’s a whisper of wings, and then the light pressure of claws on his shoulder. Eggsy is too shocked to turn his head, but Leandra does the work for him and nuzzles her soft feathers against his neck.

Harry shudders in turn as Eggsy strokes hesitant fingers down Leandra’s feathery back. 

‘Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes,’ he jokes weakly.

‘Well, it’s about time you came to get me,’ Harry says, his smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. ‘The tea here is utter shite.’

Eggsy walks closer, and Leandra squeezes his shoulder before taking off and landing on Harry’s, careful not to dislodge Gwenwyn. Eggsy takes the chair next to the bed, and watches as man and daemon reunite.

‘How do you do it?’ he asks. ‘How do you be apart, like that, for so long?’

Harry sighs, and puts his tea down. His hand shakes slightly, and Eggsy covers it with his own.

‘Too long,’ Harry explains, with a tired smile. ‘We can’t have been much older than you when we went through the final test.’

‘I did the test,’ Eggsy blurts out. ‘I did it, before we sorted out Valentine.’

‘I guessed,’ Harry says. ‘Well done.’

‘We won’t drift apart, though, will we? Like…’

‘Like Leandra and I, you mean?’ Harry says. ‘No, I don’t think so, Eggsy. You’re not like me. Your life doesn’t revolve around Kingsman like mine did.’

‘And besides, who says this can’t be rectified?’ Leandra adds. ‘We’re already closer than we’ve been in over a decade.’

‘We’ve finally got something in common,’ Harry agrees. His eyes are twinkling at Eggsy, but Eggsy is just a bit confused.

‘It’s you, Eggsy,’ Leandra explains. Eggsy is pretty sure it’s impossible for birds to roll their eyes, but she’s giving it a good go.

‘Kingsman’s in bits,’ Eggsy warns, trying to hide his pleased blush. ‘V-day’s really buggered everything up. You’ve got a good out, with this whole being dead thing.’

‘I think I’ve had just about as much bed rest as I can stomach,’ Harry says. 

‘I was hopin’ you’d say that,’ Eggsy grins.

**Author's Note:**

> So here's the daemon au that nobody asked for. Jesus but daemons are hard to decide on. Obviously everyone's headcanons will be different, so here's mine;
> 
> Eggsy - Gwenwyn - adder (snake)
> 
> Gwenwyn is welsh (I hope) for poison. Eggsy's fight with Gazelle stuck in my mind and while it took me a long time to decide, I eventually went with the english adder for Eggsy.
> 
> Harry Hart - Leandra - Red Kite
> 
> Leander is a rowing club near Oxford (it's actually at Henley, but it's close enough), and I always see lots of red kites when driving to Oxford, and so Leandra came to be. Oxfords, not Brogues, and all that. I was so tempted to use a Hart, or stag, you would not believe.
> 
> Merlin - Badb - tawny owl
> 
> Native to Scotland, I couldn't help but go with an owl for Merlin. Badb, in irish mythology, is a goddess who takes the form of a crow and has magic.
> 
> Roxy - Lugh - grey wolf
> 
> Lugh is an old irish deity and High King who is thought to be one of the Pre-romance influences for Lancelot du lac. I went with grey wolf for Roxy because she does what she's told (ie shoots the dog) and using Pullman's verse, obedient people tend to have dog daemons. But Roxy is more than just a dog.
> 
> All the other daemons were pretty much on the hoof, so I apologise for the awful names. Florian, in particular, I apologise for.


End file.
